MONOKEROS is not a series Nicolaos Lord invented. It is the series he survived into. The mythology came after the territory. The Dragons were real before they had names.
Nicolaos Lord writes under the pen name N.Lord — Night-Lord encrypted in Greek, hidden in plain sight inside a name that looks ordinary until you know how to read it. The encryption is not decorative. It is the method.
He wrote MONOKEROS because he had to. Not as creative ambition — as necessity. The Dragons in the series are the voices he learned to name. The I AM declarations are the ones that held when nothing else did. The thorns were real. The roses on the other side were real.
For years he looked at himself in the mirror. Then one day he stopped seeing a face and started seeing the horn. The seat of perception. The pineal gland — the One Horn at the centre of the forehead, connected directly to the brain, to vision, to the capacity to see through what the Dragon insists is real.
NIKO — hidden in every scene across four books, never named until the final pages — is not a character. He is the reader, before the reader knows it. The horn was always there. On every card back. In every chapter. You were holding it the whole time.
Nick built a series about his own lifetime of walking through thorns. He disguised it as a saga.
He put the unicorn on every card back.
The user holds it in their hand every day thinking they're doing a card reading — while the system is quietly doing something else entirely.
"I walked through thorns. I found roses on the other side. This is the map I left for you."
The EPIX engine — every Dragon, every I AM, every Work section — is not a framework assembled from behavioural science. It is a map drawn while lost in the territory.
The Dragons speak in the first person because that is exactly how they sound. Not external. Not monstrous. Reasonable. Familiar. The voice you mistake for your own until you learn to hear the difference.
MONOKEROS is the result of a lifetime spent understanding that difference — then turning it into a saga so you could walk the same territory with a map in your hands instead of nothing.
Discover the EPIX System
Every card in The Forge Deck carries the same back design. Matte black. White engraved figure in a Greek coin medallion. Ancient. Precise. Reversible.
It looks like a horse. It is a unicorn. The horn is there — right where it always was, right where yours is. Hidden in plain sight. 78 cards. In your hands every day.
That's not a metaphor. That's the whole architecture.